A week of being home.

Hello! Hope you're having a great weekend!

I have now been living back at home for a full week. At the moment it does not feel as if I have left university as I am in the same routine that I have been for the past two years after finishing the academic year. It just feels as if I am on my summer break and that in three months I will be back at university. I am however already starting to miss my university friends and am very much looking forward to seeing everyone again next month for graduation.

This week I have started back at my summer job and so have been mainly working. After spending the last year working extremely hard on my studies, the almost three weeks between finishing my studies and starting back at my summer job has been a long enough break and I am happy to be back doing something productive with my day. I have also been using my free time to spend some time with my family and to also do leisure reading - its s great feeling to pick up a novel after spending months of reading textbooks!

I have also been looking into getting some volunteer work in my hometown within Psychology. I have sent emails of interest to several volunteering companies and have received some information about volunteering applications. A few days ago I also received an email giving me the time of my graduation! The thought of graduating in just over a month is very exciting! I need to start worrying about hiring my gown soon.

So this week, I have been very happy to be home, and am becoming increasingly excited about graduation!

Good luck with any final exams/assessments that you have left! See you next week!

Robyn

Moving Home

Hello all! Hope you are having a great weekend!

 

This week has been a fun but quite emotional week of preparing to move home. I've tried to make the most of my last week in Luton, spending as much time as possible with my university friends and visiting towns around Luton and also going to parts of Luton that I have yet to visit.

 

 

On Monday, me and my friend Divya went shopping in Milton Keynes which is just a short bus journey away and after visiting there I was so gutted that I had never been to visit earlier - it was so much fun! On Tuesday I spent the day in Luton and went to visit the Wardown museum in Wardown park. It was great to learn about the history behind the town I had spent the past three years living in and be able to tell people a little about what I had learnt about the town we had all been living in. On Wednesday it was my last day at volunteering at Headway in Bedford. I had a brilliant time volunteering there and will miss the volunteering and the people I have met. On Thursday me and Divya went to visit our friend Saphia who commuted to Luton and so lives a train journey away. It was the last time we would be able to see her until graduation and so it was both very fun but very sad to say goodbye. Finally Friday was spent packing and having a final trip to Luton town centre and saying goodbye to friends.

 

Yesterday, after very last minute packing, I moved out of my student house and back to my hometown. I was expecting it to be a sad occasion but I didn't realise how sad I would be. My friend came round for a few hours in the morning to help me finish my packing and stayed to say goodbye until I left. Saying goodbye was very difficult, especially to my housemates who I had been living with for the past year and who were some of the first friends I made at University. 

 

 

In the three years that I have spent at University I have met some amazing people and made some incredible friends that I know I will be friends with for life. I did not expect to make such great friends and to become so attached to a town when I moved to Luton almost three years ago (also thank you to my Dad for teasing me all the way home about how sad I was.) Now I have graduation to look forward to and sorting out what I am doing for the rest of my life!

 

Good luck to everyone doing final exams and assessments, it is almost the end of exam season!

 

See you next week!

Robyn

Undergraduate Research Conference

Hello all! Hope you're doing well and the exams and final assessments are going well too!

It has now been over a full week since my final exam and therefore finishing all the work I need to do for my undergraduate degree in Psychology. In this last week I have tried to make the most of my remaining time in Luton; spending quality time with friends I am going to miss very much, volunteering and I also went down to visit London for the day which was very fun!

On Friday, it was the day of the Undergraduate Research Conference for my Psychology year group. The Undergraduate Research Conference is a conference organised by our lecturers in which we were able to present posters of our dissertation work, a selected few were able to present oral presentations of their dissertation work and guests from outside of the university were able to come and look at the work we had done.

It was an incredible feeling to have my dissertation presented in a poster form and have people read it and talk to me about and take an interest in it; all those months of late nights and early morning trying to make my dissertation the best it could be was suddenly all worth it, and it was really fun! You could tell when going to look at other people's posters too that they felt exactly the same and were so proud to show off the hard work they had done. It was a brilliant opportunity to have a look at other people's work and learn a little about different aspects of Psychology that I had not studied much on and to hear what people had to say about their own dissertations and the findings they had found.

Six people were also given the opportunity to give an oral presentation of their dissertation research to all those who attended the conference, including three of my friends (well done Mo, Diksha and Shona, your presentations were great!) It was a brilliant opportunity to hear more in detail about the research people from my year had done on their dissertations, and to hear the great lengths they had gone to conduct their research; there was one person who had conducted research using school children meaning that the ethics were very difficult and had taken many months to get the ethics right.

It was a brilliant and fun day, a lovely way to celebrate the hard work of the three years together and to spend time with the friends we had made over the three years. It was also slightly emotional. It was last day that I would be at university with my friends and saying goodbye to them adding "I'll see you at graduation" rather than "I'll see you after the weekend" made me realise that university life is now over aside from graduation, and that the next time I will see most of my university friends will be at graduation!

All in all, it has been a great week and I am very lucky to have made such good friends at university that saying goodbye to them is such a difficult thing. But now I have graduation to look forward to with them and lots of visits to see them!

Hope you're all having a great week and any work that you are still doing is going well!

See you next week!
Robyn

Last day of exams

Hello! Hope you're all well and that the exams and other assessments are going well too.

I've finished! All my compulsory university work is over; no more exams, no more assessments, and no more lectures and tutorials, so I'm taking a couple of weeks to relax before moving home for a while and starting back at my summer job.

The past week has been a mixture of many emotions; nervous for exams, excited to complete my degree and also nervous, happy to spend time with friends whilst revising together and then sad that soon I will be saying goodbye to them. For this blog post though I would like to focus on Friday - the day of my final exam of third year.

After some last minute revision in the morning, I was prepared to sit my exam in the afternoon. After finishing the exam, and therefore finishing my university degree, I wasn't sure how I was feeling. I met up with some friends after the exam

had finished and after a little walk around the mall we met up with around twenty other people from our year of the Psychology course for a meal. It was a lovely way to end what had been a stressful day but also a lovely way to celebrate with good friends all the hard work we had put in for the past three academic years.

Me and two of my friends also bought little books for people to leave nice goodbye messages in. It was a really good idea so I can look back happily over nice memories that I have made. Later on in the evening we went to a local bar where everyone was and celebrated finishing three years of university. In the end I was far too happy to celebrate our achievements with good friends through the meal and meeting at a local bar that I wasn't sad at all because of all the happy memories I have.

The only thing left is the student conference so we can show off the hard work we put into our dissertations and of course GRADUATION DAY! The conference is on Friday and then graduation in July where I will say the sad goodbyes to my friends. To all my university friends reading this, thank you for the past three years and I look forward to seeing you at the conference and graduation! To the people who are reading this who are in the middle of exams and final assessments, good luck! I'm sure all your hard work will pay off.

See you next week!

Robyn

 

Exam Stress

Hey guys! Hope you are having a great weekend and your exams are going well.

Tomorrow is the 19th of May which means its my first exam! I had been pretty calm and okay about it all until yesterday when the panic finally started. So for this weeks blog post I thought I would talk about exam worry because I'm sure I'm not the only one who gets it.

Healthy eating
Healthy eating throughout the exam period is said to help with alertness and concentration. As a student who is currently spending most of my time in the library at the minute, it is very tempting to live off junk food and take out because it is very easy to quickly buy from town but if healthy eating improves your concentration, it is one less thing to worry about.

Take a break!
If you feel yourself becoming stressed out, take a short break and do something to completely take your mind off it for a few minutes, such as going for a quick 10 minute walk. If you're stressed, you won't be able to absorb the information as well and so breaks will help you study better.

Phone a friend
If you're struggling with exam stress, don't struggle alone. Ring a friend or family member that will reassure
you that you're doing fine and everything will be okay. Whenever exam stress or assignment stress get too much, I give my Mum a quick ring to tell her how I'm feeling and she seems to fix everything.

Sleep!
Make sure that you get enough sleep. It is very tempting to stay up late and cram in as much work as possible but if you're too tired then you'll not be able to work efficiently. Also relaxing and getting a good nights sleep the night before the exam is said to be very important.

Don't talk about the exam
Also a thing I was once told by a teacher was to never talk about the exam once it was finished. We're all guilty of going straight to our friends after coming out of the examination hall and comparing answers that we had given in the exam and how we felt it went, but usually you're still filled with anxiety from completing the exam and talking about possible answers you have messed up on only makes you feel worse. So if you're a worrier this will only make you more nervous, so try not to talk and dwell on the exam. Once you come out of the exam room there is no use worrying about it because worrying will not change anything.

I hope that this has been helpful! Good luck in your exams, I hope they are all going well and also to anyone doing final assignments I hope they are going good too!

Best of luck with all the hard work that you are doing at the minute!
See you next week
Robyn.

Revision has started!

Hi guys, hope all your revision and assessments are going well! Not long now until all your hard work will pay off!

After going home for the bank holiday weekend to spend a bit of time with my family and to see McBusted, I have had a busy few days of volunteering and revising. Since half of my modules this term have no exams, two of my modules now are completely finished! This means that I don't have many lectures left and I have finished my tutorials! I have one revision lecture for Cognitive Neuropsychology and a Mental Health lecture left and then all of my lectures and tutorials will have finished for the degree!

This means that by Monday afternoon, all my lectures and tutorials for this degree will have been finished and I will have just two exams to go and plenty of time to complete all the revision I need to do. As I am sure is the case with most of you reading this, my week has been mainly about revision and trying to figure out the ways in which are best to revise.

Personally for me, I revise best in silence or with very quiet background music because I get easily distracted, and when I do get distracted I give myself a quick five minute break or move onto a different way of revision to keep my brain engaged. I have been trying to figure out the ways in which I take information in the best and have realised I am a visual learner and so notes in different colours, mind maps and methods similar to this are the ways in which I revise best. There are also other methods and information I have read up on about revision that might be helpful.

Teaching others
It is said that your remember around 95% of what you teach someone else, which is a lot! So a good way to revise may be to teach someone the things that you have learnt and revised. Not only will it help your revision, but it may help someone else too!

Testing yourself
Testing yourself is also said to be a good way to recall information. It will allow you to see the areas you are better at and the areas that you are worse at which will help you to see where you need to focus your revision at.

Relax
Relaxing and taking regular breaks is essential to your revision, you can't take information in if you're too stressed to function properly. Short, regular breaks are said to be the best way to overcome this.

Revision Timetable
Make a revision timetable and stick to it so that you can get all the revision you need done and at the same time not miss out on the things you enjoy doing. (In my case my revision timetable is based around being able to watch Eastenders).

Revision not cramming
Finally revision is about learning the information, not memorising it. If you try to remember information rather than learn it, it will not be useful when you have to use it in the future.

Hope this has helped! Good luck to everyone sitting exams and doing final assessments, I hope it all goes well!

I'll end this blog post on a happier note with a musical song about procrastination as a reminder to revise not procrastinate

See you next week!

Robyn

Dissertation is finished!

 Hello again! If you are a regular in reading this blog you will know for the past six weeks or so there has been one main thing I have been in constant worry about and that is my dissertation. However I am now very happy to say that it is completed and handed in, and I was even so happy with it that I got a copy bound to keep for myself!

My dissertation is on religion and it's potential role in psychological wellbeing and health behaviours. Many months of planning and hard work went into it, I was required to do reading around the subject I wanted to focus on and find a supervisor who was an expert in the field to supervise my research. I had to send off a form about the research I was planning to do and how I planned to do it to make sure it was ethics approved, and complete an assessment on my progress which counted towards 10% of the module. I had to, with the help of my supervisor, put together a questionnaire from previous questionnaires, collect the data and analyse the findings, and then do the write up! 

So now I have just a few lectures left, two exams and then I have finished university! It's a scary thought but a few days ago I got emailed my date for graduation which is giving me so much motivation!

Next week will be all about revision, so for this weekend I am taking a well deserved break before starting revision! Currently on my way to see McBusted tonight with my Dad before revision starts tomorrow!

See you next week!

Robyn